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Capital Planning and Investment Control (CPIC)

To make effective Capital Planning and Investment Control (CPIC) decisions, executives must provide, at an early stage in their portfolio’s life cycle, a long-term vision combined with effective planning and execution. Executives need to formulate a balanced enterprise portfolio that takes into account risks, returns, and business goals. This capital planning effort relies on a solid repeatable process and the gathering of accurate and complete data.

For many government agencies, gathering accurate data is an arduous and less than successful process. Agency data is often contained within several systems, stove-piped and poorly integrated. As a result of the many commercial tools available in the marketplace that agencies implement to track their project and portfolio data, a separate executive management paradigm exists. Some software tools are not totally configurable to meet the agencies’ needs and some may not integrate appropriately, thus an agency finds that it must purchase additional tools.

Leveraging UMT best practices and products the CPIC Solution provides a one-stop solution for government portfolio, project and lifecycle management. The CPIC Solution provides government agencies with the necessary tools to:

Build a balanced and optimized portfolio with confidence

Focus resources on projects that further the organizational goals

Ensure investment effectiveness and business value through close oversight

Identify and eliminate duplicate and low strategic value projects

Provide an early warning system for projects that are over budget or behind schedule

Create: Determine business objectives, create project proposals based on discretionary and necessary demand, and establish workflow

Select: Prioritize business drivers and projects and select the optimal portfolio given constraints

Plan: Leverage a dynamic multi-year roadmap of all the planned projects to enhance planning through greater visibility into near term and future resource and budget requirements

Manage: Monitor and report at the project, program, and portfolio level

Adoption of EPPM best practices enables organizations to better control and manage across all demand, improve resource utilization and effectively deliver the right initiatives on time. We understand it is not uncommon for change initiatives to fail, so UMT is extremely focused on developing project and portfolio management solutions that are realistic, appropriate and ultimately, implementable to ensure your project and portfolio management efforts are successful.

Prioritization of End of Year Unfunded Requirements (UFR)

Unfunded requirements (UFRs) are the list of ideas, business needs, new capabilities, software, hardware, etc., that for various reasons were not funded at the beginning of a fiscal year.
During the 4th quarter of the government's fiscal year there is often a surplus of money that has not been assigned; these funds may be a result of scope change, poor planning, management reserve, or a project being ahead of schedule, and are often used to fund those UFRs which were previously unfunded.

UMT has developed a framework for optimizing the use of these left-over funds. This portfolio-based approach helps organizations to establish a process for the collection, ranking and selection of UFRs to support the end-of year-funding decisions.

Ask for and track more granular levels of detail when it comes to budget estimates.

Start with IT & Non-IT; go deeper as needed.

Consistent and Repeatable Ranking Process

Agree on a ranking system and weight criteria using pair-wise comparison.

Optimize to get an initial UFR recommendation and tweak based on facts.

By establishing a process for weighting and prioritizing UFRs according to their strategic value organizations can make better funds allocation decision and generate more value per dollar spent.

Application Portfolio Management

In 2013 the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its third annual report, titled "Actions Needed to Reduce Fragmentation, Overlap and Duplication and Achieve Other Financial Benefits". The report identified more than 30 areas where federal agencies and departments are able to improve effectiveness and efficiency and deliver cost savings and cost avoidance due to duplication of efforts and the fragmentation of services. Further, Section 21 of Public Law 111-139, enacted in February 2010, requires GAO to conduct routine investigations to identify federal programs, agencies, offices, and initiatives with duplicative goals, potential overlaps, and fragmentation.

UMT’s Application Portfolio Management (APM) methodology was created in order to support these initiatives by integrating the disciplines of project portfolio management and capital planning and investment control into one comprehensive framework.

Implementing an APM solution with UMT will help organizations to:

Analyze, plan, and manage the connected IT portfolio

Model and control their budget and provide transparency

Identify areas of redundancy and support application rationalization

Align with business priorities and improve project success rates

Project Management Office (PMO)

Each and every year the government invests vast amounts of money, talent and willpower in project work to ensure that the right projects receive the right level of funds, that the right resources are allocated to the right projects at the right time, and that in general projects are delivered on-time, on-budget, and on-scope.

Yet establishing a framework that will provide transparency into these activities is still viewed as a glorified administrative function at best; or as unnecessary bureaucracy at worse. Some of the challenges government agencies face when attempting to put in place such a framework include:

Culture that refuses to accept centralized project control

Previous attempts at setting up a PMO failed to provide benefits

Projects are effectively managed, but their objectives seem to head in different directions

Project costs are unpredictable and difficult to capture

A Project Management Office (PMO, also known as Program Management Office or Project Support Office (PSO)), when implemented in a carefully designed governance framework, can leverage economies of scale, promote best practices, and provide visibility into the status of those investments. But, as with any type of process and mindset change, when it comes to rolling out a PMO or improving its existing capabilities, it is important to get it right. Experienced guidance to foresee pitfalls, design useful processes, and prioritize PMO goals is a critical factor to the success of a PMO implementation.

UMT routinely works with clients to create a holistic strategy to evolve the maturity of your PMO. This entails attention to culture and governance, skills development, process refinement and standardization, and information systems that support structured project management. As such, the way in which a PMO framework is implemented or enhanced is critical to its adoption within an organization. UMT’s PMO implementation methodology consists of 3 key phases:

Setup: asses the existing capabilities of the PMO, design the desired one and then implement it

Operate: focus on the ongoing functioning and improvement of the PMO; and

Knowledge Transfer: ensure knowledge relating to the operational PMO is transferred to a dedicated permanent team.